Andrew Coyne: Duffy's lawyer didn't pull his client out of the muck, but he certainly dragged the Tories into it

Well, that was edifying. The Conservative government and one of its Senators would appear to have spent the better part of the last year discreetly blackmailing each other. Now they are doing so openly.

What began as allegations of misappropriation of funds against Sen. Mike Duffy soon escalated, to hear Mr. Duffy’s lawyer tell it, to lies, hush money, and possible obstruction of justice. Donald Bayne may not have succeeded, in the course of Monday’s press conference, in lifting his client clear of the muck. But he has certainly dragged the rest of the Tory hierarchy down into it.

If we are to believe Mr. Bayne, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office blackmailed Mr. Duffy into taking a bribe. He had done nothing wrong, but was forced to go along with a “scenario” in which the prime minister’s chief of staff would repay his $90,000 in disallowed expenses — and he would keep quiet about it — with the threat that otherwise they would remove him from the Senate.

Mr. Duffy’s reluctance to go along with the plan was apparently out of concern for his good name: accepting the money would imply accepting his guilt. He was only persuaded to overcome those qualms — and to participate in a months’ long scheme to deceive the public, stonewall an auditor’s investigation and doctor a Senate report — by the thought of losing his Senate salary.

So we know the price of his good name. Though not, apparently, his silence. Mr. Duffy may be the only person in Canada who would see taking cash and a Senate seat as the way to salvage his reputation, but the PMO are almost certainly alone in thinking the biggest mouth in Ottawa would stay shut for long.

The PMO, for its part, was so distraught at the damage Sen. Duffy, notwithstanding his complete innocence of any wrongdoing, was doing to it among “the base” (I’m still quoting Mr. Bayne here) as not merely to lie, cover up and make secret payments to a sitting legislator, but to threaten to remove him from office.

This, too, seems odd. If he was that much of a liability, if you were that desperate to get rid of him, why would you pause to pay off his debts first? Why threaten? Why not just do it? Though why Mr. Duffy took the threat seriously is another question. Removing a senator under any circumstances, as we have learned, is extraordinarily difficult. But one who, while personally blameless, had tales to tell of being offered cash for his silence? Good luck with that.

So: nobody did anything wrong, and everybody is covering it up. Except it’s not quite exonerating, is it? Mr. Duffy’s defence on the housing allowance issue is that, yes, he declared as his principal residence a house he barely set foot in, and yes, he claimed expenses for “stays” in Ottawa that, having lived there for decades, he did not incur, but it was all right because several senior Tories told him he could, the rules did not say he couldn’t, and other senators had done the same.

As for the rest of the accusations against him, we’ll have to wait for the RCMP to finish its interminable investigation. Perhaps it will be found that, indeed, the senator took no part in claiming per diems for Florida vacation trips and Tory fundraisers, as he claims: that it was all a series of unfortunate errors on the part of his assistant, a hitherto unknown symptom of her post-partum depression.

But Mr. Duffy has long since ceased to be the issue. Certainly if the excerpted emails and memos his lawyer read out are indicative, he was indeed counseled on several occasions by senior Tories, including Sen. Marjory LeBreton (the former government leader in the Senate), Sen. David Tkachuk (the former chairman of the Senate internal economy committee) and Nigel Wright (the former chief of staff to the Prime Minister) that he was entitled to his entitlements.

But it’s what they did after that is of more particular interest. Mr. Duffy is aggrieved that, having first encouraged him, party grandees then abandoned him, and have now moved to suspend him (along with Sens. Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau) from the Senate without pay. But the story he has begun to tell — and threatens to tell further — promises to do them far greater harm.

Contrary to the picture the PMO has put about, of a lone Mr. Wright, acting on his own and without consultation, suddenly deciding to pay Mr. Duffy’s expenses out of his own personal fortune, Mr. Duffy offers further evidence that it was part of a sustained exercise in damage control of which a good many top Conservatives either knew or took part, among them — according to Mr. Wright’s lawyers — three officials in the PMO, including Benjamin Perrin, then the prime minister’s legal counsel.

This is not only contrary to what the Prime Minister told Parliament in the spring — in Question Period Monday, he appeared to concede that, saying (in French) that his answers were “according to the information I had at the time” — it defies common sense. It is, on the face of it, illegal to make under-the-table payments to Senators; whether or not a crime was committed here, it would surely raise all sorts of alarm bells among those who knew of it. Yet no one told the Prime Minister? Not even his own lawyer?

But still another question remains. What game is Mr. Duffy playing? His lawyer made several pointed references to the mountains of emails in his possession, yet refused to release any, saying they would come out in the event Mr. Duffy’s case goes to trial. It was hard not to pick up the suggestion they might stay unreleased if… if what? What does he want? What can the government give him? Who’s blackmailing whom?